New Year's Eve Hopes

The new year will bring some big changes in my personal life. After thirteen and a half years, I'm parting ways with the law firm where I have been office sharing and providing services on an "of counsel" basis as a substantial part of my case load (in my situation, I'm basically an independent contractor as opposed to being in an employee or partner relationship).

My core solo practice remains, at least for now, but with a collection of cases and clients that is mostly new. I'm at a minimum looking at a very different business model. I will probably get certified as a mediator. But I've been continuously employed since I graduated from law school thirty years ago, and I have both valuable legal skills, and valuable soft skills not specific to a profession. So, I'm not overly worried about landing on my feet.

In the next little bit there are nuts and bolts to work out. My old office needs to be emptied, and I swear that my law books and banker's boxes full of files are twice as heavy as they were when I put them in my office in the first place. At a certain point, age does not improve your strength or stamina. Filings will need to be made in all of my active cases to alert the courts and the other parties to the new arrangements. A couple of outstanding financial relationships will have to be closed out. Clients will need to be told how this will affect them. A TBD venue (probably some sort of virtual office arrangement based someplace closer to my home than my current office) will need to be put in place. One or two new vendor arrangements for things like legal research accounts will have to be worked out.

This big change is both sudden and a long time coming. It has been clear for a long time that a major shift was overdue. But thinking it is one thing, and doing it is another. The daily rhythm of my life will change more than it has for a long time.

It certainly helps to be at a place in my life where I have a cushion. The mortgage used to buy our home twenty-five years ago has steadily gotten smaller, and with re-financings to a 3.65% interest rate, the payment, even with taxes and insurance, it is smaller than my Denver based daughter's one bedroom apartment rent in a less pricey neighborhood than Washington Park. I have enough cash in the bank to cover at least ten months of expenses, more if I'm careful. Other than the mortgage, I have no debt. I pay off my credit cards in full every month. I have no student loans. I'll pay off my $54 parking ticket from the City of Manitou Springs a couple of years ago, as soon as I can talk to a human being to resolve a glitch in their collection agency's computer system (which will probably take several hours or more of my time). I suspect that their computer system can't handle hyphenated names or something like that.

My children are grown adults who have finished college, have good jobs, have apartments of their own, have their own serious romantic partners, and no longer need meaningful financial support. My health insurance covers two people instead of four. My household will soon have only one fully paid off fuel efficient car with myself as the sole driver that I've driven 6,000 miles a year on average and will probably drive less in the coming year with less of a commute. There is no deferred maintenance on the car, only one modest project (a 25 year old swamp cooler to replace) for the house, and no deferred dental work or health care.  I don't have any pets at the moment. 

I've avoided taking on golden handcuffs. My home and car are modest. My most expensive hobby is buying books with Amazon rewards credits. I don't ski or have a boat or a plane or have a vacation house or play golf or belong to an athletic or country club with high monthly dues. I don't get season tickets to pro sports. I'm price conscious when I buy things. I don't even have cable or satellite TV. Aside from business trips and family visits, I only go on a real major vacation every five years or so and just finished the most recent one, a 30th anniversary trip to the Bahamas.

This isn't to say that my life isn't comfortable. I don't keep the thermostat at 65º. I have a couple of video streaming services and a Spotify account and high speed internet access. I have a smart phone, although not the latest and greatest one. I have a decent laptop that I use all day long for both business and pleasure. I live in a good neighborhood in a house that is tastefully well finished on the inside without being over the top. I got a lawn service when my kids were no longer available to mow it for free. I shop for deals when I get groceries, but get ample amounts of good quality food. I don't drink bottom shelf wine and liquor any more. I don't have to make choices between buying medicine or getting health care and buying food or paying utilities. Now and then, I go out to eat someplace nice, or see a play or opera or concert, or plan a weekend getaway. I buy art now and then, although nothing super expensive. I've had a few pieces of heirloom jewelry custom made for my wife over two and a half decades. I have a decent work-life balance. 

But the bottom line is that my "monthly nut" is modest, and I'm healthy enough to work as much as I need to in order to cover it. My life style choices and tastes and attitudes are closer to upper middle class than middle class, but my budget is not. So, I don't have to make a huge amount from self-employment to continue to grow rather than to drain my savings, and I can get away with shifts to new business models that are base hits rather than home runs economically without breaking the bank. I could probably break even at twenty fully collected billable hours a month. 

I am optimistic that I'll be able to shift the way that I make a living in a way which will be a positive change and work out economically over the course of the next year and beyond, even though, as someone in the business of warning my clients about worst case scenarios, I know that nothing is promised.

Meta Note 

Between this blog and its sister blog, I've made 450 blog posts in this 366 day long year, despite a hiatus for my anniversary trip, and more than six weeks combined of being sick successively with a "generic" but serious respiratory infection, and then with COVID.